Quantifying the interaction between grammatical gender and social gender roles at a worldwide scale

Project Summary

Gender relationships are changing and the gender disparity of today is questioned in many societies. It is important to understand both the mechanisms that sustain deeply-entrenched gender inequality and the far-reaching, culture-specific implications of this problem in order to overcome this challenge at all levels of social life and in different parts of the world. One way to analyze gender disparity across societies regardless of their socio–economic or political orientations is through language. Our project will compare the degree of change in social structures (prevalence of inequality or labour differentiation) in societies speaking languages with and without masculine/feminine-based gender systems.

Marc Allassonnière-Tang
marc.allassonniere-tang@mnhn.fr

• Researcher at CNRS

Olivier Bonami
Heather Burnett